Page 142 of GlitchBorn Heart

54

DragonFire

Playlist: Bring Me to Life – Evanescence

Kael

I stagger back, my pulse throbbing in my throat. Neon orange light bleeds from my tattoos, moving angrily. No longer static ink, but alive, crawling, reshaping like their feeding on the system itself. My eyes catch the light of the monitors, and I can see them flare fiery, orange-gold, burning like two small flames. I can’t catch my breath, my vision’s blurry, and my chest is swirling with a ball of intense heat that feels almost paralyzing.

“Kael!” Ember gasps, placing both hands over her mouth. Her voice drowns under the roar of collapsing code.

The DreamBand I slipped around my wrist self-activates with a neon flash against my fiery skin. Something’s not right; I didn’t twist it. This is no ordinary DreamBand. Where a standard band flickers with a soft blue glow, this one flares bright orange and white. I can see lines of code thrumming beneath the surface of my skin like veins, moving toward the band, in sync with my breathing.

Ash. He gave me this band a few days ago, told me to try it out, give it a spin. I’ll be damned. Hacked by the best, with mods only he could design.

The air in the lab shifts when it comes online. Monitors blink, lights dim, and the very walls seem to lean toward me, as if the system knows who its owner is. I’ve worn DreamBands before, every U21 has, but this feels unprecedented.

I lift my wrist, and the tattoos along my forearms ripple, the ink almost glowing in response, syncing with the band as though the two are paired. I look over my shoulder. Lyra’s still half on the holo-pad, her lips folded under, afraid to speak.

All this time Ash let me believe I was just a man with a knack for taming machines. No spark. No magic. No power except the one I built. He stood next to me while I hacked my way through secure systems, raised an empire from stolen laptops, thinking I was clever. Just a normal, boring prodigy hiding in a world of exceptional anomalies.

Every flash of neon I’ve ever seen in my own skin, every strange occurrence that I wrote off as stress or bad lighting, it was all an omen. Every split second where code bent for me without command, errors resolving neatly, ideas forming exactly when needed. It was all power. My power.

And if Ash knew, it means he’s been quietly shaping me as long as I’ve been shaping this system. He’s been an architect behind the architect.

I flex my hand. The band glows brighter, orange veins continuing to spread under my skin. For the first time, I can feel the system respond to me, not as a server, but as an entity that recognizes me. Like it’s been waiting for me to awaken.

The band is a key. Ash’s key, crafted quietly, hidden in plain sight. I know his signature code; it’s messy genius. A layer of chaos braided into order. This is a key to open my system wide. He knew, and he built me a way into it in case of catastrophic failure. He left it buried deep in my infrastructure like a gift for a future version of me I didn’t even know I’d become.

But this, this thing around my wrist, it’s also a door. I can tell instinctively. And if my assumption is correct, he made me the only one who could open it.

I know this is the point of no return. Lyra will be degraded into an archive by LINK. She’ll take every bit of humanity left inside her unless I act quickly. If I push, it won’t just let me watch the system; it will drag me through. And once I’m inside, if LINK resists, I may have to destroy my own creation. If that happens, there may not be a way back out for me or for Lyra.

I envision dragging Lyra back in. Binary numbers visually appear, forming 3D objects and floating data streams that shimmer with intense, neon hues. The code isn’t silent. It drones with a low, electric frequency that vibrates in the teeth. A symphony of man and machine in tandem.

She’s no longer on the holo-pad, but I can hear her voice crackle through the feed, small and strained: “Kael...don’t. Don’t you dare...”

Too late, baby. I shut her out. My hand tightens on the DreamBand. “I’m coming in after you, Taiyō!”

The lab explodes into white noise. My body jerks back, but my mind slams forward, ripped from flesh and bone. It feels like every nerve is on fire, demolished and rebuilt into lines of code. My tattoos blaze neon orange, bleeding light into the data stream as I collide with the system itself.

And then I’m there. With her.

The hum hits me first. Not in the ears, but deeper, like it’s felt in my bones. I don’t know how she withstood this for so long. The corridors of the system react instantly. Walls that were flat, lifeless lines, ripple as though they’re bowing to me. The colors seep from cool blues into heated amber, a glow that pulses in time with my breath. And through it all, I feel her so deeply it’s jarring.

The system’s drum shifts, reacting like a living thing without commands. The entire grid seems to warp, like it knows its master has finally stepped inside. LINK stutters, her voice glitching between code and static.

UNSTABLE

UNAUTHORIZED ACCESS

CONTROLLER BREACH

Pretty much sums it up. I can see Lyra in the corner. She shakes her head, already knowing what’s coming next. She’s not standing in my lab anymore; she’s here with me. Inside my machine that now recognizes us both.

“No, Kael!” She throws her hands up, signaling me to yield. A swipe of my hand and code forms in the air like vapor trails, dissolving her words. My hand comes down hard like a well-disciplined block, and I see it form a tether that wraps tightly around her. She doesn’t fight it.

I pull.